Thursday, July 4, 2013

INDEPENDENCE DAY-SASTER

﻿Working long hours of late, I’ve been winding down with B-movies.Unfortunately, I’ve hit a rough patch where the films aren’t verygood...and that’s even by SyFy standards. Let’s start with the onethat’s most appropriate for today’s holiday...

Independence Daysaster [2013] is a low-budget alien invasion movieand a pale imitation of the big-budget 1996 Independence Day. Theonly kind of cool thing about the newer movie is the heroes are thePresident and his estranged brother. Out of communication afterhis helicopter is brought down, the Prez must deal with a hawkishVice President without a lick of common sense and find some way tostrike back at the aliens. The brother is a firefighter who triesto protect the Prez’s son and the son’s friends and who teams witha SETI scientist to try to fight the aliens. Assisting the Prez,a pair of young hackers. Not a bad band of heroes, but the actingis shaky at best.

We never see the aliens. The attacks are carried out by spinningdrones and mechanical protrusions buried underground eons ago. Howperceptive of the aliens to not bury any of them near where therewould someday be oil or coal or anything else we might dig or drillfor and thus discover them. Such foresight.

Everything is controlled from a mother ship on the far side of themoon. No fatal weakness there.

Everything about this movie is predictable. You know who is gonnadie and pretty much when. You know how that mother ship is gonnago down. About the only surprise is the cheap-ass surprise endingwhich shows more mother ships heading for Earth. Because we wouldnot want viewers feeling good about the good guys beating the badguys for more than thirty seconds. Give this one as wide a pass asyou can manage.

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Piranha (2010) was the worst movie I’ve seen this year. It wasa vile exercise in gore. I’d call it “disaster porn,” but it wastoo close up and personal to be elevated even to that lowly level.Here are the two good things about the movie:

Richard Dreyfuss plays the first victim of the prehistoric piranhaswho enter our world after an earthquake opens up a crack in theirunderground sea. He plays this character as an aging Matt Hooperand there are other nods to Jaws as well. That was a funny notion.

Closer to the end of the movie, Ving Rhames plays a police officerwho jumps into water filled with piranhas and, wielding an outboardmotor as if it were a weed-whacker, slices and dices the murderousfish to allow others to escape. He’s clearly being eaten by thesefish and does succumb to them, but, damn, that is one ridiculouslyheroic moment.

The rest of the movie? Lousy acting. Gore. Boobies for the sake ofboobies. Gore. Terrible people doing terrible things. Gore. Thesheriff and her kids...and her son’s girlfriend...and a scientistsurvive the piranhas and destroy the piranhas. Only to have thatfleeting moment of relief and victory cruelly torn from them by ashock ending that directly contradicts information about the fishgiven by a scientist earlier in the film.

This is a sick film. The crazy gore doesn’t succeed as dark humor.It panders to sadists. If I hadn’t borrowed the movie from my local library, I would have taken a weed-whacker to it. Stay away fromthis bloody turd.

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The original Piranha (1978) was kind of sort of a parody of Jaws.Steven Spielberg called it “the best of the Jaws ripoffs.” ThoughI haven’t seen the movie in decades, I remember it as being solidB-movie entertainment. So, hoping to get the bad taste of the newPiranha out of my mouth and with the original Piranha not available frommy library, I watched Piranha II: The Spawning (1981).

Piranha II must have had a smaller budget than Piranha. The killerpiranhas are government-created hybrids of piranha and other fish,including flying fish. So we got scene after scene of these sillycreatures flying like bats in a low-budget vampire film and sceneafter scene of the actors holding these creatures to their necks tosimulate the fish eating them. Hilarious stuff that.

The good guys are a diving instructor, her estranged husband, theirson, and a government scientist turned whistle blower. They havetheir flaws, but are all more likeable than the characters in the2010 Piranha. While The Spawning has a reasonably high body count,the movie spends time with most of these future victims and so makestheir deaths more than points on a scoreboard.

The movie is set at a Caribbean hotel that caters to tourists on abudget. That allows the flamboyant hotel manager to assume a rolesomewhat equivalent to that of the mayor of Amity in Jaws. Why dosuch guys never consider the lawsuits that must surely follow theirdepraved disregard for the well-being of their customers/tourists?
Even a so-so lawyer could make bank on those lawsuits.

Some interesting notes:

Piranha II was the directorial debut of James Cameron, the guy whokeeps stealing ideas for his movies. The version of the film I watched
is likely his re-editing of the original.

The estranged husband is played by a so young Lance Henriksen thatI didn’t recognize him at first. His performance isn’t especiallynoteworthy, but good enough for a B-movie.

Piranha II: The Spawning ain’t no work of cinematic art. But it’sa fun way to kill an hour-and-a-half and that was all I required ofit. Worth watching once.

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I had never seen Dogora, the 1964 science fiction film from Toho,so I bought the DVD and watched it with my son Eddie. Actually, Iwatched it twice because both Ed and I fell asleep during my firstviewing of the film. And, yeah, that’s mostly on the movie, whichseems a whole lot longer than its 83 minutes.

A blob-like alien lifeform takes out a satellite and then commencesto chowing down on diamonds and related minerals. It’s a cool ideafor a creature, but the special effects of 1964 weren’t up to thechallenge of making it look cool. Even a low-budget remake couldovercome this shortcoming.

The human supporting cast is interesting and varied. You have thisgang of diamond thieves with a sexy treacherous woman among them.You have the shady insurance investigator who claims to be workingwith Interpol, but I’m not sure I buy it. You have a scientist andhis lovely assistant and a young police detective. I enjoyed thepeople scenes more than the monster scenes.

There was no excitement or tension to Dogora. It just meandered,slowly meandered, from start to finish. The second viewing was nomore enjoyable than the first, though I am tempted to watch it onemore time in the original Japanese with English subtitles. Maybethat will make for a better experience.

Dogora is not recommended unless, like me, you have a serious TohoStudios jones. Maybe this is a cry for help.

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Mighty Peking Man is a 1977 film from Hong Kong made to cash in onthe 1976 American remake of King Kong. I only seen a small portionof the movie prior to getting it through my local library system.It screams its humble origins with its often laughable man-in-suitspecial effects, but it also has some cool stuff and, with a coupleof exceptions, a cast of unlikeable characters. Even the apparenthero of the movie, an explorer and hunter whose girlfriend did thenasty with his TV producer brother, doesn’t act admirably some ofthe time. I’ll get to him in a moment.

Giant monster ape breaks loose. Kills promoter. Beats up on citypretty good. Nasty British police chief calls out all the troopsto kill giant monster ape, even tricking reconciled hero and junglegirl into calming giant monster ape down. Things do not end wellfor anyone. King Kong decides this movie couldn’t have made enoughmoney to be worth the lawsuit.

This is silly B-movie fun and worth watching once. If I ever getmy own monster movie show - I’d call myself Terrible Tony and makerude jokes at the commercial breaks and, like Ghoulardi, blow up avariety of things - I would air this movie.